Book review | the mysticism and historical conspiracy theories behind the Templar Order

Knights Templar: Rise, Peak and End, by James Wasserman, translated by Liu Xiaoou, published by Hunan People's Publishing House.

Text/Gao Lin (Young Historian, Economic Observer Annual Tribute Book Reviewer)

The smooth text and rich illustrations make James Wartherman's Knights Templar: Rise, Peak and End more like a delicate album in his hand, from the crusades to the crusades to Philip IV's burning of the last chief of the Knights; how the Templars built a feat for the king of Jerusalem, and how to run the real estate all over Europe, and the money order they invented became the "medieval Shanxi ticket number" familiar to Chinese readers. In the end, the rich and invincible countries attracted the surprise attack of the king and the abandonment of the pope, and the panoramic history of the Knights Templar can accompany the reader through a rather pleasant reading time. If these stories are more or less familiar to the reader, it is better to put aside all the habitual memories of the Knights Templar and simply re-examine the history of the Templars, and it will be found that it is actually the most distorted and bizarre of the various historical things that people think they are familiar with, and the history of the past centuries has superimposed a series of contradictory marks on this group of White Monks.

In different history books, and even in different chapters of the same book, the Templars were sometimes mad warriors charging with their flesh and blood, and sometimes cunning merchants with abacus beads cracking. Most of the time they are fanatical believers in Christianity, but when the pen is turned, they are the "Antichrist" in the eyes of the Inquisition. Some say that they can win more than they lose because they believe in piety, but in the face of the Inquisition, these knights are forced to admit that "public denial of Christ" is a prerequisite for becoming Templars. Centuries have passed, and although the injustice of their trials has been emphasized in various ways, that they were beaten and innocently murdered, the Holy See has never publicly rehabilitated these murdered monks, and the crimes against the Templars have never been overturned, at least on paper. In the past, people were not sure that they had truly abandoned the Christian faith, and today no one can firmly declare that they must not have "spat on the cross."

Even though the Templars had been uprooted, and those of them who had firmly professed their innocence had been tied to the stakes, the Templar story was far from over. In the centuries that followed, the figures of these white-robed monks were almost ubiquitous. From the Reformation to the Agrarian Reformation to the French Revolution, from the Black Death to freemasonry, from Jewish intrigue to anti-Semitic political revelry, there are people everywhere who solemnly speak of the Knights Templar. There can no longer be a symbol, an image, as inlaid with a white robe with a red cross, that simultaneously implies so many and so contradictory meanings. If there is a group of people who have been hiding in the shadows and trying to destroy the world through conspiracies of whispering, and the collusion of money and power, they are the Templar Order. But if a group of people overtly fought, overthrew the king, and imprisoned the nobles in the prison converted into monasteries, they were still the Templar Knights. Jewish bankers plotted a terrible conspiracy in a secret conference room, and they must have been behind the Templar Order. A group of nobles united against this conspiracy, and their small group was named "New Knight Templar".

Why do templars have so many legends? Will it contain so many secrets? Among the many military monastic churches of the Middle Ages, it is not the oldest or the longest-running, but it is undoubtedly the most mysterious and popular. Even in the twenty-first century, dan Brown's novels about these mysterious monks led to the film Da Vinci Code was able to cause a general sensation and a heat of widespread discussion. In Ubisoft's historical conspiracy theory game Assassin's Creed, if a villain who has been fighting the protagonist from ancient times to the future is needed, the Templar Order is chosen.

The answer to this question may be hidden in the history of the Legend of the Holy Grail. What exactly does the Knights Templar have to do with the fabled "Holy Grail"? Is the Holy Grail really "the blood of God," as Dan Brown and The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood claim? Were the Knights Templar the guardians of the Holy Grail? If you look at the history of the Knights Templar from this perspective, you will find a completely different Knights Templar.

If you go back in history to Jerusalem after the First Crusade. You will find that the "kingdom" established with the Crusades is actually shrouded in a cloud of sorrow and misery. For the Crusaders, the capture of Jerusalem was the fulfillment of their lifelong aspirations, which meant that the sins of their lives were written off. It is impossible to persuade these people who have spent the rest of their lives waiting only for "heaven" to continue to fight for the defense of the city of Jerusalem and save the city from the seas that surround it in the Arab world, and these crusaders who have received tickets to the kingdom of heaven only want to go home.

Others were not interested in heaven and participated in the Crusades in order to seize their territory in the East. From the day the Crusaders set foot on the eastern soils, such careerists established a series of "Crusader states" from the Kingdom of Tripoli to the Principality of Antioch. Compared with Jerusalem, the other Crusader states were much more strategically positioned, with most of the land adjacent to the sea for trade with Europe and European support from the sea. Only Jerusalem was besieged by the Arabs, and the Crusaders took the city with pilgrimage enthusiasm, and then left the isolated city and returned to Europe.

The kingdom was nominally the monarch of all the Crusader states, but in fact the rulers of the powerful Crusader states had long since become one monarch. For the king of Jerusalem, the only thing he could rely on was his faith in the holy place of Jerusalem, otherwise he could not resist looking around at the Islamic world around him. But faith was not always on the side of these Jerusalem kings. The Archbishop of Jerusalem, who was established at the same time as the Crusader Movement, wielded the power to interpret the faith and the King of the Republic.

Another obvious fact is that the first king of Jerusalem, Gottfried, did not actually have the title of "king". When the entire crusaders elected him king of Jerusalem, Gottfried accepted only the low-key title of "Guardian of the Holy Sepulchre," modestly saying that "no mortal is qualified to reign in the land of Jesus and David." This phrase actually highlights the loophole in the legitimacy of the kings of Jerusalem throughout the ages, and if you want to rely on faith to strengthen your power, you have to face a very embarrassing problem, and the land that was ruled by the old days was David and King Solomon. What is the legitimacy of the rule of a Crusader leader from Europe compared to these saints? Even jesus' own title includes "King of Judea," and in the land of God, how can a Prince of Europe ascend to the throne?

So religion was not only a life-saving straw for the king of Jerusalem, but also a noose around his neck, but also in the hands of the Archbishop of Jerusalem and the Pope of Rome. This weak kingdom was in danger, and by virtue of its religious beliefs it could attract European reinforcements, but once it had defeated the enemies around it, some people would stand up and question the legitimacy of the king of Jerusalem as soon as it turned around. This is the kingdom's dilemma, and there is no way out.

If one looks at the Knights Templar, who the King of Jerusalem enthusiastically supported from this perspective, it is not only an attempt by the weak Crusader state to build a standing army, but more likely that the white-robed monks served as propaganda tools for the King of Jerusalem, as if they were a medieval public relations team that was active in the historical arena of the time. They used medieval mystique to create a myth about the legitimacy of the king of Jerusalem, the "legend of the Holy Grail" that began to circulate in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. If you look at the Holy Grail and the Holy Blood in this way, and the Da Vinci Code based on The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood, you will find that the story is most likely not the whims of a victim of twentieth-century conspiracy theories, but rather that they may actually see a propaganda case from hundreds of years ago through the fog of history.

If we discard all the mysterious parts of the Holy Grail and the Holy Blood, the whole content of the book can be summed up in three very brief sentences: first, "There is no Holy Grail at all, the original meaning of the Holy Grail is divine blood"; second, "The holy blood is that Jesus had a wife and descendants, and his blood has been passed down to Europe"; third, "This blood of Jesus, who passed through the Mediterranean to Marseille, was eventually passed on to the Carolingian dynasty through inheritance and marriage." ”

It does not matter whether these three sentences are valid or not, nor is the historical details and genealogy used to support them, what matters is who the "Legend of the Holy Grail" composed of these three sentences is beneficial to, which is the key to unveiling the mystery of the "Holy Grail Story". The first king of Jerusalem was Gottfried, Duke of Lower Lorraine. When the French Capetian dynasty finally replaced the Carolingian dynasty, who was the orthodox heir of the Carolingian dynasty that Huguep Cape had driven away by force? It was Charles, Duke of Lower Lorraine. So the mythical bloodline of Jesus in the Grail legend was directed against the Carolingian dynasty, and the descendants of the Carolingian dynasty just happened to ascend to the throne of Jerusalem.

So from the legend of the Holy Grail, we can deduce the secret fourth sentence: The descendants of Jesus were none other than the kings of Jerusalem who sat on the thrones of Jesus and David. This is actually the essence of the whole "Legend of the Holy Grail", and it is its entire purpose - to tell people that the king of Jerusalem is the heir of Jesus, and that they claimed the throne in the land of "David and Solomon" on the basis of the most justified reason of the Middle Ages, "blood inheritance". Through the propaganda of the "Legend of the Holy Grail", the image of the kings of Jerusalem changed from the poor knights of Europe, the small princes who pawned their territories to the East, to the legitimate monarchs who took back their ancestral lands at all costs. Implicit in this propaganda is the fact that the kings of Jerusalem wanted to prove most of all when confronted with the Archbishop of Jerusalem and the unruly Church, the monarchs of other Crusader states who did not obey their authority, and other Crusader leaders who had come from Europe to save the country from danger but were also hungry for power—the legitimacy of their rule over the land.

It's a propaganda copy of the King of Jerusalem shaping his legitimacy. The Knights Templar may well have been the tool and channel for spreading the story, and only from this perspective can it be understood why the Templars have shown so many different mysteries in history compared to the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights, who also fought bloodily in the East. Why they always kept a secret posture, why the judge of the beautiful man Philip accused them of so many crimes, even accusations of betrayal of the Christian faith, these untruths have aroused so many doubts, because the Templars may really have a mission that was deviant in the eyes of Christians in Western Europe.

But such a notion, and even the legend of Jesus' bloodline, is not really a flood beast in the land of Jerusalem. Because in the eyes of most people in this land, Jesus was not God, and his wife and blood were not sensational things for these Muslims. Even without considering the Muslim subjects ruled by the Kingdom of Jerusalem, there are historic Maronite Christians in the Mountains of Lebanon. In the eyes of these factions, Jesus is not God, and having a wife and a child is not earth-shattering horror news. It was not difficult for the King of Jerusalem, or the Knights Templar, who served the King, to create such a story.

What was really difficult was how they made people in Western Europe believe. For most people in Western Europe, Christianity is the only legitimate faith. There can only be one interpretation of the Bible, and that is the interpretation of the church. It was the real problem to get them to accept a legend that was widely known in the Near East. So from the very beginning the Grail is seen as a secret, why do all versions of the Grail story repeatedly emphasize that "only a knight with a pure heart" and "no stain" can embark on the path of finding the Holy Grail? Because only the knights with faith and simple hearts were the target group of the Templars. Only these people can be moved by this Near Eastern story of serving the royal family of Jerusalem and thus serve the royal family of Jerusalem.

The kings needed knights from Europe to serve themselves, and it was better for them to fight only for their faith and not for the benefit of the land. They should also be "pure in heart" to be able to accept the "hereditary rule" of the king of Jerusalem. This is an ancient official propaganda hundreds of years ago, but it lost its relevance with the fall of Jerusalem and the end of the Crusader movement. It became a distant memory of the chivalric poetry that remained in Europe, the mysterious habits and traditions of the Knights Templar, and became an excuse and a crime against the Knights by the beautiful man Philip.

When all these things were annihilated by history with the demise of the Knights. Everyone who finds its scales and claws will feel like they have discovered the earth-shattering secrets behind human history. From the Middle Ages to the author of The Holy Grail and the Holy Blood, they believe they have touched the most secret and subtle secret in history, but they did not expect that everything was only because they took the advertising leaflets of the ancients in the wrong order. Rearranging and combining the order of the "Holy Grail Story" may be a certain degree of re-seeing of history as it is.